A worker uses an ice resurfacer on the ice rink after training at the Milano Rho ice hockey facility, one of two that will house men's and women's hockey at the Milan Cortina Winter Games.Susana Vera/Reuters
Pierre-Édouard Bellemare has seen a lot of ice rinks in his career, having played 10 seasons in the National Hockey League. On Wednesday, he stepped off the ice at Milan’s Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena and everyone wanted to know one thing: what did he think?
“It feels actually pretty good,” he said.
Bellemare and his teammates on the French national team are the first to try out the ice at the main rink in Milan that will host the women’s and men’s tournaments, including the gold medal games for each. As such, their opinion matters.
The arena has been steeped in controversy for the past few months amid a series of construction delays that cast doubt on whether the building – and its ice surface – would be ready in time.
A test event held several weeks ago made global headlines for all the wrong reasons when a small hole emerged in the ice during a game, forcing the NHL to state that it would not send the world’s top players if the ice was not playable. Since then, the playing surface has been redone and construction crews are racing to finish the arena’s interior.
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After holding their third practice on the rink this week, several France players gave it their thumbs up.
“The quality of the ice feels better and better every day. So that’s pretty good,” said Bellemare.
“When we started, we could feel the cracking. You can hear kind of that noise of almost like you’re on a lake and you’re kind of cracking the ice,” he said.
“But now already it’s different, and it’s not as clear anymore. It’s already much more white, so it looks more and more like the normal stuff.”
France's Pierre-Edouard Bellemare moves the puck during a training session prior to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, on Wednesday. The practice was an opportunity for the French team to test out the ice that has drawn much criticism in the leadup to the Games.Hassan Ammar/The Associated Press
Don Moffatt, a Canadian who oversees ice making for the Colorado Avalanche and was brought in to ensure the Olympics would have an NHL-quality surface, said construction delays meant he was forced to wait almost to the very last possible moment to put the sheet in.
Because crews were finishing the lower bowl over the past month, dirt and dust in the arena made it impossible to start work on time. Moffatt wasn’t able to begin installing the new sheet for the Olympics until the start of last week.
“It’s been the biggest challenge of my life. This has been unbelievably difficult,” he said.
“We were right against it … We were that close.”
Moffatt said the ice has to be made in layers, and built up to be strong enough to withstand a tournament that will see three games played some days.
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“Ice is like a muscle. You need to break it down before you can make it stronger. So when you have new ice, you’re constantly adding water,” Moffatt said.
He skated on it himself this week and is happy with it now, because the ice felt like an NHL surface.
“I love it. I really like it,” he said. “It shows me that we made it the right way. We made it in slow, thin layers, instead of just throwing a ton of water out there and let it freeze. We built it in thin layers.”
As the tournament progresses Moffatt said he will be watching the games for signs of how the surface holds up.
Workers inside the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, continued to put the finishing touches on the venue during a women's hockey practice session on Wednesday.David W Cerny/Reuters
“I’m watching the pucks to start with. People see pucks bouncing and they think it’s bad ice. It’s not always that. When rubber hits plastic, it’s going to bounce when it hits the boards,” Moffatt said.
“What I’m looking for is the passes from [defenceman to defenceman] and the breakout passes through the neutral zone. When they’re saucering the puck over somebody’s stick, I want to see if that puck’s going to land in flat and stay flat.”
Unlike most NHL and international rinks, the ice doesn’t sit on cement, but is atop an insulated layer similar to sand, he said. That gives it a deeper, more hollow sound, which caught some French players off guard. Moffatt said he’s going to brief the other teams about it when NHL players begin arriving later this week.
The rink has also been controversial because it is about three feet shorter, and about three inches narrower than an NHL rink, due to a different footprint used by the International Ice Hockey Federation, which measures in metres, not feet. That has resulted in a slightly smaller neutral zone, with the blue lines moved toward centre ice.
Yohann Auvitu, a defenceman for France who played 58 NHL games with New Jersey and Edmonton between 2016 and 2018, said he is not bothered by the ice controversy or the rink size.
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“At the end of the day, I’ve been playing all around. You know when you play in Florida and it’s 35 degrees outside, the ice is not good. That’s how it is. So no complaining,” Auvitu said.
“There’s going to be three games a day, so I’m not expecting to have good ice. That’s just how it is. Just handle it.”
Most of the arena is completed now, but on Wednesday construction crews were working on the concourse, putting final touches on spectator areas.
“The locker rooms are fine,” Auvitu said. “We have a little bit of a walk to get there but those things don’t really matter. It’s nowhere perfect, so I am not expecting perfection here.”